City and County Centered Wikis

Built on the same concept as a typical Wikipedia page, city and county-centered wikis are popping up around the country.

Finding reliable information about a city can be tricky, especially if you want more than tourist information or multiple points of view. Thanks to a new trend of creating city- or county-centered Wikis -- encyclopedia-like, crowd-sourced websites -- that information niche is starting to be filled. The Washington Post reports that one of the first of these sites is Fairfaxpedia, which focuses on Fairfax County, Va. It was founded by George Mason University student Frank Muraca, an economics major, who hopes to help residents make informed decisions while inspiring civic engagement. The usual rules for a Wiki apply to the site, which means open-source writing and editing and constant evolution of what individual entries say about the county. The cities of Charlottesville, Va., and Rochester, N.Y., also have their own Wikis.